Ever since the NHL playoffs began, Canadian newspapers have filled not just their sports sections, but just about every other part of the paper with groupie-like articles about hockey. On Saturday, The Globe and Mail published a feature that somehow tried to connect the concept of brave, chivalrous, gentlemanly behaviour with the Toronto Maple Leafs -- a journalistic stretch if there ever was one.
For the past eight years, I have visited many a hockey locker room and arena, looking not for signs of masculine prowess but for pieces of a deeply disturbing puzzle (my research would become a book on sexual assault in Canada's national sport). In the summer of 1992, a former national wrestling champion asked me to investigate a story in Swift Current, Sask. Two hockey players raped a girl and they got away with it, he told me. "They raped her and then so did the justice system."
This tip opened the door on my eight-year odyssey. The players, Brian Sakic and Wade Smith, were charged with sexual assault, but by the time the trial rolled around it was the girl who was up on public mischief charges. The players had been traded to a team two time zones away.
Judge Gerald King of Saskatchewan Queen's Bench found the girl not guilty, in the strongest language possible, and he called the hockey players' behaviour "degrading and disgusting." He added, "They ravaged her body for their own sexual gratification. She honestly believed she said 'No.' "
Still, charges against the players were stayed, and then dropped. The girl spent several years in counselling, while the players pursued their careers.
Despite evidence to the contrary, people I interviewed in Swift Current in those days believed that the players' coach, Graham James, "made gentlemen out of those boys." That was in 1993. Four years later, Mr. James himself pleaded guilty to 350 counts of sexual assault against two of his own players.
When I interviewed Mr. James about sex and hockey players, he spoke not only of junior players but of his friends in the National Hockey League. "In towns with professional players, they're always going out and getting [laid] . . . I know guys who have hundreds of names of women they could phone up in every major league city," he went on. "I went out with a friend in a bar, and at least 30 girls would have done anything to him." Mr. James's perspective on NHL players happens to match what virtually every male sports journalist has told me, off the record.
And it's always off the record: One columnist warned me that you might be able to get away with writing about a player's problems with alcohol, but writing about how he treats women gets you banned from his or anyone else's locker room. "It's off limits," the columnist said. "Guys get traded because they're sleeping with a teammate's wife. We never write about that. One wife walked in on her husband while a waitress was giving him [oral sex] The wife finally left. We wondered what took her so long. He'd been doing that stuff forever."
This playoff season, we've read of hockey players described as "chivalric" and "gentle, polite, articulate" -- suggesting that locker rooms are one of the last recognized areas where traditional male values such as courage, valour, and brotherhood prevail.
Those of us who have researched this area know differently. There are two pieces of paper clipped above my desk. One, attributed to the Syndicat des journalistes de Radio-Canada, reads: "The role of journalists is to uncover what others are trying to hide." The other piece of paper says Kegoh zaum-doongaen.Translated from Ojibway, it means "Not too much mouth" or "Do not talk about those things you know nothing about."
Dr. Stephen Ortiz of the University of California at Berkeley did a four-year study of professional-sports marriages, and defines them as "institutionalized adultery." Dr. Ortiz, who did his undergraduate studies on a track-and-field scholarship and still runs today, is no stranger to the locker room. He has seen it from the inside out, and in his study he quotes the anonymous wives of well-known players, who tell a very different story than those found in newspapers.
"The men will put down their own wives in the inner sanctum of the locker rooms," he reports. "They'll call them hags or worse, say they're terrible in bed, anything to show their dominance." The wives, who are discouraged from attending road trips, "must know their place" if they ever do accompany them. The wives describe themselves as "non-persons" and "second-class citizens" and must play a traditional female role or their husbands will be accused of being "pussy-whipped."
Not all players are like this, it's true. Most sports journalists report that there are five or six on a team who behave in atrocious ways. And the rest cover for them. That's what journalists often refer to as the brotherhood of the team. It dictates strict silence. Some sports have institutionalized the practice in rules that cover not just the players, but their families.
One NHL team in the United States has its own gynecologist. Why? When wives and girlfriends suffer certain symptoms, they are treated for (but not always told about) the sexually transmitted disease they have contracted from their husband or boyfriend. Such brave and loyal men.
Sometimes groups outside the team help keep their secrets. A counsellor who works with girls in the sex trade in a Canadian city with two professional teams told me about an attempt to raise money for a centre for the girls. She asked police on the vice squad what they thought about hitting up the sports teams for a big donation.
"Don't even bother," she was told. "They're the biggest customers of these girls." When she asked the cops why none of the athletes was ever arrested, she was told flat out it was because it would blow the cover off the image the teams were trying to project. Her story matches one that a former child prostitute from the same city told me. This girl had been servicing hockey players since she was nine years old.
Journalists do not receive these stories by standing in a locker room, note pad in hand, wearing a big grin. No one will tell you the story behind the story until they trust you, and that means years of building bridges between yourself and the public. It means going, not to the world constructed for journalists by professionals who know exactly what to feed them, but to the gritty world of used-up child prostitutes and rape survivors. It means talking to enough ex-players enough times that they finally tell you what really happened.
It also means keeping up on scholarly research. Dr. Alexis Peters of the University of Windsor did the first study of its kind in Canada last year when she compared junior hockey players with non-playing males of the same age. She found the players showed a statistically significant higher level of "rape-myth acceptance," hypermasculinity, belief in danger as excitement, violence as manly, callous attitudes toward sex, sex-role stereotypes, adversarial sexual beliefs, and acceptance of interpersonal violence. The only area in which the players scored lower than non-hockey playing males was in their ability to express empathy.
Some heroes. Laura Robinson is a former national-level cyclist and cross-country ski racer, and author of Crossing The Line: Violence and Sexual Assault in Canada's National Sport.